This invention relates to an electrical contact member and more particularly of the type used in a variable resistance device having a movable contact or wiper, such as a potentiometer.
There have been numerous prior art efforts to provide an acceptable and yet inexpensive multifinger contact serving as the wiper element in these devices. One such method of producing a multifinger contact involves the winding of a conductive wire about a mandrel, plating the wound wire with conductive material and selectively removing the plating to produce severable contacts having a plurality of fingers and a base portion. This method necessarily involves several complicated and expensive steps. A typical method of producing an inexpensive multifinger contact involves merely slotting and removing material in a strip to produce a plurality of finger members extending from the base which are spaced from one another. This method will not provide a plurality of densely arranged slender fingers necessary to maximize the number of fingers over a given area to be contacted. Efforts have also been made to shear adjacent finger portions from one another. This tends to leave the fingers in lateral contact with one another and, thus, restricts the capability of each finger to flex independently.